Blogpost 6: The Philosophy of Fear

Whenever I here the word: fear, I start to think about ghosts, darkness, flesh-eating monsters, zombies, mummies, blood, terror, gruesome death and screaming people. I know, its overrated, huh? Well, I am very imaginative. Kidding aside, although there a lot of connotations that can be attached with the word "fear", there is this one denotation that I like: a distressing emotion by impending danger, evil and pain, whether the threat is real or imagined. (Source: Dictionary.com) I believe that fear is part of our survival instinct. It helps us to survive such dangerous situations. For example, you are being chased by a wild dog, the initial emotion that you will feel is fear and eventually your nervous system will think of a way to flee from that situation. In that way, you'll be safe and alive.

As I was searching for more details regarding fear, I came across this article on Philosophy Now, which is entitled, "A Philosophy of Fear by Lars Svendsen" by Mark Frankel. I was very hooked with the topic because I discovered that Lars Svendsen wrote a book that entirely focuses on fear.

"We can philosophize about anything, even fear," says Mark Frankel.

According to the article, philosophizing about fear is a possible idea because even during ancient times, philosophers had thought of various kinds of emotions such as fear, love, anger, lust and many more. The author of the book, Lars Svendsen, claims that our lives are greatly being colonized by fear. In addition, he believes that, "It is tyrannies not democracies which thrive on the politics of fear." I agree with him because tyrants tend to become sadist. They say that they want what's the best for their countrymen, they become dictators, they lust for more power, thus creating misery to the citizens.

Now let's proceed to a religious point of view, it is stated in the article that, there is a paradox which involves Christianity. An example of this is the presentation of Christianity as a religion of love. But it ironically, isolates its principles and store fears of the temporal world with threats of hellfire to come. Nowadays, we have no news about the threat of damnation from the priests of bishops who leads the church. Maybe it is because educated opinions are tend to be repelled by such a blatant manipulation. 

Moreover, the article talked about how philosophers are classified. They can be classified on whether they have an optimistic or a pessimistic political philosophy. For optimist philosophers, they believe that the civil society is endangered by trust and reasons. On the other hand, the pessimist philosophers believe that we hang on to the assistant for fear of so much worse. Some of these fearful philosophers are, Machiavelli and Hobbes. These two philosophers believe that fear can be used to train people.

              Thomas Hobbes             Niccolò Machiavelli

I believe that the author of the book, "A Philosophy of Fear", is really interested in discovering the relationship of fear in philosophy and politics. His book contains important information that can be useful for people. Fear can be viewed in different aspects and in this post it is all about the philosophy of it. Fear is a mainstream topic and I think everybody can relate with it. Fear has become a terrible feeling for most of the people.

Reflecting on what I have read about in this article, I begin to wonder, if there are more philosophical views that is related with fear. This views may be positive or negative but regardless if its positive/negative, I'm sure that it contains a point that will enlighten us. Most teenagers nowadays are more prone to experience fear. Why? Because teenagers today are very curious. They will try and try new things just to feed their curiosity. And some of the outcome of their actions may not be good. Who knows, maybe this will be the indicator that they'll begin to fear something.